Artemis Blu and the Solarium Multiversity

Rating: 2/5

I found this book from a Youtube review: Infinity Unicorn Book Gives Me Infinite Pain. I like trainwreck-style book reviews, perhaps more than normal ones. A Quora answer led to me reading the infamous Empress Theresa back in the day. That book, for all its plot holes, had zero mistakes in grammar, spelling, and punctuation. I cannot say the same about this one.

There’s a section where Artemis is consistently misspelled as “Artems.” I want to say this was deliberate and unexplained. It would be very in character. Is it an elaborate statement about how i is an imaginary number, and they are in imaginary places therefore the i is gone? These are normal questions to have while reading a book of this caliber. One could adopt the view that it stimulates creative thinking.

The dialogue is not particularly well-crafted: X smiled, then Y smiled, then X smiled again. Neither is the plot.

The plot: a self-insert “crystal fawn” goes on a fantasy space time adventure to a magical university and beyond to save the world. She meets friends along the way, and does a lot of Math Things.

The book is very quotable. Here’s one quote that stood out to me - not because it didn’t make sense, but because it was the single longest passage that did make sense.

“Why thank you, Mr. Reindeer! Oh, my goodness! Your eyes!” Artemis smiled. Valentinas’ eyes were composed of harp strings and each eye had a different number of strings. The left eye had only one string, while the right eye had eleven strings. The harp strings were colored alternately red and white and they connected the eyelids so that his irises were lines, peppermint lines. Upon blinking, the red color changed to white and the white changed to red, while the one changed to eleven and the eleven to one. This was dizzying to behold. Where were the pupils?

However, an ordinary passage looks more like this:

I would like to discuss experimentation as a scale-invariant methodology and multiple time dimensions. I’ve always thought that to achieve a GUT of physics we would need a GUT of mathematics to discretize and therefore geometrize time, instead of modeling it as continuous.

It’s an interesting concept, absolutely. Less interesting when you have to slog through ninety pages of it.

Let me go on a tangent, because that is what the book likes to do and I am trying to embody its spirit. What’s it with girls/women naming themselves Artemis? You don’t see people naming their self-inserts Hera or Demeter. I swear it’s like, Queen something, then something Kitten, and then Artemis as the third most common username variant. I had an Artemis phase too. I’m not exempt.

It wouldn’t be right to judge by conventional standards any more than you’d judge a mathematics textbook by its prosaic form. It’s part of the art.

It’s not for most people. It was not for me, and it’s probably not for you either! The author knows this.

But for the very tiny percentage of people that are pursuing mathematics PhDs and need to let off some steam, this may well be a 5/5 book. And I’m happy for them.